A wake for a cow in a pub in rural Ireland sounds like an episode of Father Ted. We knew we’d get no further that night. The pub was “packed to suffocation”.

Turtle Bunbury attended Bertha’s wake in the Blackwater Tavern near Sneem in Co. Kerry in 1993 by chance. This is the story of Bertha, a remarkable old bovine he wrote for the Guardian newspaper in 2010.